We Are All Searching for It

Nothing Beats Feeling Good

You do it. Your family is doing it. Your friends and colleagues are doing it. We are all in search of things, actions, and content that make us feel good. Why? Because emotions lead to actions that make us grow as humans, so we might as well be on the lookout for the good ones.

Untranslatable Emotions

Throughout life, we all experience times where we’re finding it difficult to express our emotions and situations because they are often very difficult to explain and put into words.

“In our endless search for feeling good, understood, and recognized as humans, we are attracted to brands, people, music, and films that make us resonate and feel better. We love content that resonates with our emotional state and helps us interpret our life and emotions that we have difficulties in expressing and understanding”.

In the exciting article about untranslatable emotions, Lisa Feldman Barrett from Northeastern University says that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.

“Certain people use different emotional words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad. For them, they are synonyms, whereas, for other people, they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them”.

This is called emotion granularity. So, the better the emotional vocabulary we have to describe our state of mind and feelings, the better we can understand ourselves and cope with our lives.

Create Meaningful and Emotional Customer Journeys

I believe that the mindset emotion granularity applies to brands, marketing, and communication as well. The richer and more meaningful emotional connection that resonates with our customers, making them feel good, the more relevant and effective our communication will be. Forrester concludes that if you give your customers a positive emotional experience, they are more likely to buy from you again, buy more from your business, and recommend your products and services to a friend (Just like we see with Disney World). If you provide a negative emotional experience, they’re more likely to leave you for someone else.

So how do you create emotional communication? Sound and music are the languages of our soul. Music reflects people’s reality; it is a cultural connector that connects people in global communities. Music is significant and influential, which makes it very interesting – and useful – to brands.

Brands that dare to use the power of emotions and music to create an emotional, meaningful customer journey will naturally attract us by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations in our never-ending search for feeling good.

In the digital world, there are only two senses: Hearing and Seeing.
So are you using the full emotional bandwidth by using music strategically and emotionally in your communication? Have you mapped your Customer Emotional Journey regarding what sensations and emotions you want your audience to feel when they listen to you? Have you identified and described your brand identity in terms of music, so you know where and how to use music to substantiate the desired feeling – and when to be silent?

Where and How Do We Grow From Here?

It all comes down to our willingness to recognize ourselves, brands, and customers as emotional beings, making more emotion-2-emotion communication and meaningful customer experiences. We all consist of feelings created by frequencies, and we are unconsciously attracted to content that makes us feel good. We are humans searching for connectivity, real compassion, authentic relationships, and a conversation to shift consciousness to a more meaningful life.

We do not remember noisy and numb content. Only bold, meaningful, and emotionally engaging content and music that makes us feel good can achieve this.

So feel a little bit more. Look into your customer journey, add an emotional layer, and contemplate what emotionally vital moments and feelings you create in each touchpoint. Try to listen to the words, sounds, and music your brand uses, feel it, and then ask yourself:

• What emotions (if any) do you create in this brand touchpoint?
• Does the music substantiate the desired feeling you want to leave the audience with?
• Do you know what, where, and how to use music and sound deliberately to create more effective communication?

If not, perhaps you are just creating more noise.

NB. This blog was created while listening to emotional music by Ólafur Arnalds